Whenever we finally establish the first brave colonists on Mars, besides seeking their survival, they must also seek a new cultural identity - and what defines our cultural identity more than anything else, is MUSIC!

It was the dawn of the visionary new space race between NASA and Elon Musk's Spacex, to send mankind to Mars by the 2030's, which was one of the main factors which inspired me to create "Ascension of the Lyre". Music has always been the 'invisible baggage' people have always taken with them, whenever they settle in strange new lands - right from biblical times, as that timeless psalm recounts, when the exiled Jews hung their lyres on a willow by the rivers of Babylon whilst they wept remembering Zion, to the first Scots/Irish Appalachian settlers, who brought with them, the wealth of their traditional fiddle melodies - the first colonists of Mars will one day soon, surely do the same!

Just as in the thought provoking TV series "Mars", where fittingly, the ancient emmer wheat grains cultivated at the dawn of civilisation were chosen as the first crops to be grown for the first colonists on Mars, my idea of using the recreated lyre, the ancient musical instrument most closely associated with the dawn of human civilisations on Earth, is equally as fitting for the choice of what could be the first iconic 'interplanetary musical instrument' of mankind, as we soon set out to form our first interplanetary civilisation on Mars...I just hope that the first Martian colonists may someday be listening to my music in their habitat modules!